Blackness and Visibility 1600-1800

CALL FOR IMAGES 

Journal18, a journal of eighteenth-century art and culture, have published a call for papers in order to create a rather fascinating online resource 'chronicling the representation and regulation of black bodies in Europe, c.1600-1800'.

Interested participants are invited to submit artworks (submitted either as copyright-free digital images or as hyperlinks) that correspond to this theme. The submitted pieces will then be woven into a large digital timeline for researchers, educators and students.

http://www.journal18.org/wp-content/uploads/Journal18_Timeline_CfP_Jun2020.pdf

....

Hyacinthe Rigaud, Black Archer, M Beaux Arts, Dunkerque

Your little handful of facts

"I like biography far better than fiction myself: fiction is too free. In biography you have your little handful of facts, little bits of a puzzle, and you sit and think, and fit 'em together this way and that, and get up and throw 'em down and say damn, and go out for a walk. And it's real soothing; and when done gives an idea of finish to the writer that is very peacful. Of course it's not really so finished as quite a rotten novel; it always has and always must have the incurable illogicalities of life about it, the fathoms of slack and miles of tedium. Still, that's where the fun comes in; and when you have at last managed to shut up the castle spectre (of dulness) the very outside of his door looks beautiful by contast."

Robert Louis Stevenson, 18 June 1893
warm acknowledgements to Michael Caines for finding this gem (fathoms of slack!)

Black Lives

just one, in fact

FANNY EATON 

drawn by 

Joanna Wells

Albert Moore

Walter Stocks

Simeon Solomon 

Janey Morris in PPE

one to make you smile.

but would Jane have chosen that exact shade of turquoise?

one more disgusting thing about Bristol and Edward Colston

R J Lewis The Death of Colston Bristol City Art Gallery

is this painting, commemorating Colston's death, where the artist, inexplicably has placed an African maidservant kneeling to kiss the enslaver's hand.

The artist R J Lewis is utterly obscure. It appears that the painting was commissioned or purchased by Bristol city council in the 1840s, to hang in a civic space like the town hall. About a century later it was transferred to Bristol City Art Gallery, probably because Victorian painting was so outmoded by then. 

Bristol people have been protesting and denouncing Colston and his slaving for decades now.